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Columbia and Stanford Creating $30 Million Institute to Bridge Journalism and Tech

Big news on the innovation front: Columbia Journalism School and Stanford's School of Engineering are teaming up to create an Institute for Media Innovation. The Institute hopes to bridge the gap between journalism and technology and encourage collaboration between the two disciplines.

The institute, officially called the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, is made possible by a $30 million gift from former Cosmopolitan magazine editor in chief Helen Gurley Brown in honor of her late husband. The gift will go towards funding two director roles — one in each university — as well as a physical space attached to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism complete with a high-tech newsroom. The money will also help support post-graduate fellowships and "Magic Grants" to further stimulate innovation. It is the single largest donation in the Journalism School's history.

Technology has caused journalism some growing pains, with the rise of bloggers and the plethora of ever-adapting social media tools. The Institute was created to recognize this disconnect and bring the two closer together. It's also a way bring the East and West coast closer together, according to the release:

The East-West collaboration of the two schools will enable students at both institutions to build upon their ideas with professors and innovators at both universities. At both locations there will be a strong emphasis on executing new ideas and demonstrating products and prototypes. The Institute will establish ongoing links to business leaders and media companies to bring its innovations to market.

In that sense, the Institute won't be a traditional "school." There will be an emphasis on creating products and projects, much like a media-based venture capitalism firm. "This is way beyond the honorable project of teaching journalists how to be more adept at using Twitter and setting up good web pages," says Nicholass Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School. "This gives the two institutions a partnership really to lead the way towards the future interaction of media and computer technologies by building big, important things."

The Institute for Media Innovation has a board of advisors that include Frank Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation; Eve Burton, VP general counsel of Hearst Corporation; and General Bill Campbell, chairman of the board at Intuit and Apple Inc. board member.

The advisors, like the students and faculty, will come from a mix of journalism, technology and business backgrounds. "The ideal student is going to be a student who is creative and entrepreneurial but we fully expect to have teams working together from different fields," says Bernd Girod, a Stanford engineering professor who will serve as the Institute's founding director until Columbia appoints an East Coast counterpart. "We're going to throw this wide open and look for the best ideas and we expect those to come from young people and the more surprising and the more original and the more game-changing, the better," he says.

Columbia Journalism School has a long history of turning out celebrated journalists but its social and digital programs have sometimes fallen behind the curve despite the introduction of a new, "Digital Media" concentration and the addition of dedicated, tech-minded faculty. The Institute will help Columbia puts its stamp on the digital world, while also pairing with Stanford's reputation for creating Silicon Valley game-changers (Stanford alumni have helped found Google, HP, Cisco, Yahoo! and more).

That bond will hopefully turn the page on journalism's future, says Lemann. "I was raised in the generation of the Watergate story and things like that, so [journalists] thought everything we already do is so fabulous that all we need from the rest of the world is to sit around and applaud and we're not in that movie anymore ... We kind of have to rebuild the function of journalism and media from the ground up."

The Institute will be built by June 30, 2014 but will start accepting fellows and reviewing grants by Summer 2012. Is the Institute for Media Innovation a step in the right direction or is traditional journalism on its way out? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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